The 17-arch bridge over frozen Kunming Lake, in front of the Summer Palace northwest of Beijing.  Seeing the Summer Palace in the winter was certainly a different experience than seeing it the previous spring.

Cracks in the thick ice on Kunming Lake.  I’ve never walked across an ice lake before, and it was a weird experience; strange pinging noises, like the sound of guy wires snapping, kept emerging from water lapping against the ice below.  Occasionally I could hear the ice crack a little as I walked across, which was a bit disconcerting.

The Summer Palace main structure, as seen from in front of the Long Corridor at the foot of Longevity Hill.

The Long Corridor, a 700-meter long covered walkway along the north shore of Kunming Lake; it is full of paintings on the beams overhead.  The Summer Palace has been rebuilt and abandoned and burnt a number of times over the last few centuries.  In the late 1800’s the Empress Dowager Cixi used money meant to modernize the Chinese Navy to rebuild the Summer Palace; the existing Navy was quickly destroyed by foreign troops after the Boxer Rebellion a decade later.

One of the paintings underneath the Long Corridor.  The paintings are fairly new, as the originals were whitewashed during the Cultural Revolution.  Each painting tells the story of some incident in Chinese folklore.  This particular story, about how a general named Zhuge Liang convinced a great soldier named Jiang Wei to become his assistant through deceptive means, comes from the great Chinese novel “The Three Kingdoms.”

One of the Buddhist temples at the Summer Palace, shown here from underneath the Long Corridor.

On the main grounds of the Summer Palace.  It was quite a cold day - which I was thankful for as I walked across the ice of Kunming Lake to the main complex of the Summer Palace.

Rooftops within the Summer Palace.

Behind the Summer Palace is this beautiful wall of restored Buddhist carvings.

This cute visitor to the palace was so bundled up that if he had fallen, he wouldn’t have felt it at all - but he wouldn’t have been able to stand up again either.